Queer Parenting Book Club: The Pleasure Principle
We are your worst fear, we are your best fantasy.
In my previous post on Auntie Mame, I presented Mame Dennis as an idealized vision of queer parenting born out of the 1950s, written by a queer man (writer Edward Everett Tanner III writing under the pseudonym Patrick Dennis) who is frequently described as living a “double life” as the head of a prototypical midcentury family (married with two kids) and a member of the burgeoning gay ghetto of New York’s Greenwich Village.
That interplay between mainstream heterosexual culture and the “gay ghetto” (both physical and conceptual) is the focus of Michael Bronski’s 1998 book The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. In my first queer parenting post, I quoted at length the thesis of Bronski’s book: that the mainstream culture’s fear of (and attacks upon) queer people and queer culture is rooted in the ways queer culture successfully critiques the limitations of mainstream culture and offers an “attractive alternative” of a culture based on freedom and the pursuit of pleasure:
These attacks occur because homosexuality and homosexuals present attractive alternatives to the restrictions that reproductive heterosexuality and its social strictures have placed upon heterosexuals. The real issue is not that heterosexuals will be tempted to engage in homosexual sexual activity (although the visibility of such activity presents that option) but that they will be drawn to more flexible norms that gay people, excluded from social structures created by heterosexuality, have created for their own lives. These include less restrictive gender roles; non-monogamous intimate relationships and more freedom for sexual exploration; family units that are chosen, not biological; and new models for parenting.
Today, we are going to dig deeper into Bronski’s argument.
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